Adapting North West of Earth By C.L. Moore - Orbital Decay (MicroRed version) From The Red Room & The New Flesh Rpg - Further and Deeper Details on the Campaign Setting, locations, and adventure details

 Adapting C.L. Moore’s seminal North West of Earth stories—featuring Northwest Smith, the cynical, gun-toting Earthman spacer navigating the dark, decadent underbelly of a dying Solar System—into the brutal, body-horror, and hyper-visceral framework of Orbital Decay / The New Flesh (and The Red Room) requires leaning heavily into atmospheric dread, flesh-altering cosmic horrors, and high-lethality grit. This blog post picks right up from 

Adapting North West of Earth By C.L. Moore - Orbital Decay (MicroRed version) From The Red Room & The New Flesh Rpg - a D100 Random Martian Encounter table with Space Wrecks and Abandoned Star Ships

Below is a complete campaign conversion guide to run C.L. Moore’s planetary romance through the lens of the MicroRed / Red Room / The New Flesh mechanics.

1. Setting Synthesis: The Meat-Mars & Corp-Imperial Solar System

In Moore’s fiction, Venus is a dripping, suffocating jungle of ancient horrors and Mars is a sun-bleached, decadent graveyard of dying gods. Under the New Flesh / Orbital Decay lens, this planetary romance turns into industrial flesh-pulp horror:

• Terran Trade Authority (TTA) & Corporate Hegemony: Replaced with oppressive, flesh-harvesting megacorporations and imperial syndicates that view colonists and spacers as disposable bio-mass.

• The Venusian Jungles: Dripping, living biomechanical swamps where the flora hungers for blood and integrates with human nervous systems.

• The Martian Canal-Cities: Jekkara and Shambleau-infested outposts are filthy, neon-and-dust dens of bio-addiction, black-market flesh-ware, and ancient parasites masquerading as gods.

2. Core Mechanics & System Adaptations (MicroRed Engine)

The MicroRed / Red Room mechanics emphasize extreme lethality, sanity loss, and physical degradation. Adapt standard mechanics as follows:

Stat Mapping

• Violence (VIO): Raygun combat, knife fights, raw physical power, surviving physical trauma.

• Nerve (NRV): Resisting horror, keeping your cool under alien hypnosis, resisting addiction (god-dust, Venusian lotus).

• Cunning (CUN): Streetwise navigation of Jekkara's slums, lock-picking, piloting rust-bucket skiffs, tech-salvage.

• Flesh (FLS): Biological stability, mutation resistance, bodily integrity against parasites and bio-toxins.

System Hacks

• The Stress/Degradation Track: Replaces traditional hit points. Taking physical or psychic harm inflicts Flesh Wounds or Psychic Scars. When the track fills, roll on the Gore & Mutation Table.

• Raygun Heat & Burn: Standard heat-rays don't just deal damage—they cauterize, melt, and leave hideous bio-scars. On a critical failure while firing a raygun, the power cell ruptures, inflicting 1d6 Flesh Damage on the wielder.

3. Archetypes / Character Classes

Players choose from three grim pulp archetypes suited for Orbital Decay:

1. The Spacer (The Northwest Smith)

• Description: Cold-eyed, cynical mercenaries, gun-runners, and drifters living on the fringes of TTA space.

• Starting Gear: Heavy Chrome Raygun, worn leather jacket, flask of Earth gin, 1d6 lock-picks.

• Special Ability (Cold Reflexes): Once per session, take an extra violent action during a ambush or surprise round before anyone else moves.

2. The Bio-Thief / Silt-Runner

• Description: Canal-city locals or Earth deserters who survive by harvesting ancient alien technology and black-market organs.

• Starting Gear: Sonic Cutter, bio-scanner, pouch of god-dust, high-frequency needle pistol.

• Special Ability (Street-Slick): Auto-succeed on CUN tests to navigate alien slums, find illegal markets, or evade local corporate marshals.

3. The Eldritch Scholar / Flesh-Cultist

• Description: Obsessive researchers or apostates of dead gods who have peered too deep into pre-human texts.

• Starting Gear: Translating monocle, ancient bronze dagger, jar of preserved alien fluid, 1 eldritch scroll.

• Special Ability (Glimpse Beyond): Test NRV to mentally query an ancient relic or alien structure. Success grants crucial lore; failure causes 1d4 Psychic Scars and temporary hallucination.

4. Monsters & Cosmic Parasites (New Flesh Stat Blocks)

The Shambleau (The Ultimate Flesh-Predator)

An impossibly gorgeous entity disguised as a helpless woman. Beneath her hair lies a writhing mass of crimson, snake-like tendrils that feed on life-force and sensory pleasure.

• Stats: VIO 2, NRV 5, CUN 4, FLS 6

• Special Attacks:

  • Ecstatic Embrace (NRV Test): Victims caught in the tendrils must pass a Nerve test every round or be paralyzed in euphoric bliss, taking 1d4 Flesh/Sanity Drain per round.

  • Flesh Infiltration: If a target reaches 0 Flesh while bound, their nervous system is permanently rewritten, turning them into a hollow, obedient husk.

The Lathi (Ivory Preserver)

Tall, multi-limbed, bone-white entities that preserve living specimens inside hardened amber-resin.

• Stats: VIO 4, NRV 4, CUN 3, FLS 5

• Special Attacks:

  • Resin Spray (VIO/FLS Test): Fires a jet of quick-hardening amber. Targets who fail are immobilized; failure by 3+ traps them completely, suffocating them into stasis.

Yirog (The Cold Gray God)

A subterranean, incorporeal entity that manifests as cold, shifting shadows and feeds on human warmth and memories.

• Stats: VIO 1, NRV 6, CUN 5, FLS 4 (Immune to physical attacks; vulnerable only to heat-rays and sonic weapons)

• Special Attacks:

  • Thermal Vacuum: Drains all heat in a 20ft radius. Characters take 1d6 Flesh damage per round unless protected by thermal suits.

5. D6 Encounter & Horror Seed Table

d6	The Horror / Incident	Biological & Mechanical Effect
1	A companion discovers their long hair has begun twitching and pulsing in their sleep.	Flesh Test required: Failure indicates a dormant Shambleau spore has taken root in their scalp.
2	A local water-vendor in Jekkara sells "Pure Earth-Water" laced with liquefied alien tissue.	Drinking it grants dark-vision for 12 hours, but causes skin to turn translucent and bleed under sunlight.
3	A TTA patrol boat crashes in the canal, its crew melted into a single pulsating mass of organs inside the hull.	The mass still breathes and attempts to speak in Earth languages through multiple fused throats.
4	An ancient basalt stele in a tomb emits a low, rhythmic thrumming sound that matches the characters' heartbeats.	Characters within 30ft must sync their breathing; failing a NRV test causes severe internal hemorrhaging.
5	A black-market surgeon offers "Martian Eye Upgrades" crafted from dried alien lenses.	Grants thermal vision, but the user occasionally sees invisible, extra-dimensional entities watching them from corners.
6	A sandstorm unearths a pre-human warship whose living interior walls are starving for fresh blood.	The ship’s doors lock behind intruders, slowly extruding needle-like tendrils from the bulkheads to drink.

6. Campaign Hook: "The Velvet Husk"

Premise: The players are hired by a desperate TTA executive in the slum city of Jekkara to retrieve his missing daughter, who vanished into the low-city opium dens.

The Twist: She hasn't been kidnapped by desert reavers—she has voluntarily surrendered herself to a ancient Shambleau hive beneath the red sandstone ruins. The hive is using her to incubate a bio-weapon capable of liquefying the entire Terran Trade Authority garrison from the inside out, turning the colonial port into a sprawling, living nest of red tendrils.